Sherlock on style
by writerfan2013
Summary: A drabble as Sherlock selects the day's outfit. Now updated: Sherlock on cars. And snow. And... roast chicken. Now - Sherlock on scent. Talent can be such a trial.
1. Sherlock on style

I am awake. Time to get up.

Clothes. Wardrobe. Not one of those hanging rails as if you are in a bargain basement store. Firstly, why would you wish to reproduce the stressful and ultimately unrewarding experience of searching for an idealised item in a shop which specialises in supplying the lowest common denominator? Secondly, exposure to sunlight and dust damages fabric.

Door open. Hangers... empty. Clothes are probably still in the wash. No, clothes are on floor of wardrobe in tangled heap. Looks a little like an impressionist sky, Van Gogh perhaps.

Wonder if anyone has studied the patterns made by randomly dropped clothing and their correlation with conventional art.

Which clothes? Task of the day... not known yet. Picking suitable items contains too many unknowables.

These are nearest.


	2. Sherlock on cars

A car is a device for moving from A to B, those being two points on a map where A is your present location and B is your desired destination. A train is a similar device, or a plane, with the difference that both these modes of transport require you to present yourself at a specified departure point at a given moment in time.

This is annoying and inconvenient as the start and end points of train or plane journeys are highly unlikely to be your own personal A or B. Unless you are an airline pilot or train driver, of course.

The car on the other hand is its own start point. Get in, drive, arrive. You control A and B and the time of your journey.

A car also forms a handy badge which you can employ to identify yourself to others.

In Britain, for example, driving a BMW is a convenient shorthand for, I am unlikely ever to indicate that I am turning, despite having spent all this money on a car which almost certainly has some little stalks on the steering wheel for that purpose.

An Audi announces you as a sales rep who think he is above BMWs.

A compact car such as a tiny Fiat lets other road users know your childhood penchant for dodgems. And warns them of your likely continuing laissez faire attitude to stop lights.

A Mini says that you are nostalgic to the point of forgetting that the description 'mini' would normally preclude a five person vehicle the height of a horse.

A car with a selection of flower stickers on its corners alerts other drivers that you have not thus far been too bothered about your paintwork and that if in doubt, they should give way to you.

A hybrid lets everyone know that you think the solution to a world too full of cars, is another car.

And and Aston Martin these days mainly says that you wish you were as competent and sexually attractive as James Bond.

I don't have a car.


	3. Sherlock on snow

There is a lot of sentiment attached to snow. People go all gooey over it while ignoring most other forms of precipitation. You don't hear people calling each other to the window to admire the rain. Wake up, it's rained in the night, they definitely do not exclaim.

In the countryside snow can be aesthetically pleasing, if inconvenient for those in isolated areas. In cities it is just inconvenient.

Transport systems fail at the first hint of snow. Pedestrians slip and fall. Their injuries add to the strain on healthcare systems. Cars crash and trains are cancelled. Boilers can't cope as everyone cranks up the heat to maximum, forgetting that they are now asking their appliance to overcome a giant temperature differential between the living room and the yard. Companies are obliged to conform to a level of safety impossible to achieve in order to protect themselves from lawsuits should their staff trip, or become slightly too cold because it is midwinter outside.

I acknowledge snow as a necessary component of the seasonal cycle in most northern hemisphere locations. But I don't love it.


	4. Sherlock on roast chicken

I never intend it to end like this, but it invariably does.

First, the bird - steaming from the oven, skin glistening with its chosen glaze - honey, perhaps, or lemon and basil - and settling into the tray for its post cooking rest.

Then the carving, an act of near ritual significance in many households, and often performed by the alpha male, or a person who believes he holds that role. It amuses me to watch the true head of a household allow some lesser person his delusions, in order to get dinner served with the minimum of fuss.

These days Watson carves, lending the task a distinct surgical air. I cannot take my eyes off it while she works. The precision. The care she takes with her tools. Her slender fingers peeling away a breast, or firmly separating a leg joint from its socket.

The bird is left perfectly divided, and arranged on a plate, wanting only an oxygen mask to complete the ghoulish spectacle.

Watson is unaware that she does this. She believes she is serving dinner, not exercising nostalgia. This bothers me. But watching her carve a chicken, this I would miss if she stopped, and so I have yet to tackle it with her.

Then, the table. There are vegetables, nominated by me for their balance of minerals and vitamins, and prepared by Watson. She can make even a cabbage more than nutritionally relevant.

We put chicken on our plates, plus vegetables, and start to eat, as is the custom in the Western world when seated at a dining table, with knives and forks.

We eat and Watson tries to make conversation, somewhat fruitlessly as I focus on refuelling my body in order to support my mind in its deductive efforts. I occasionally throw her a metaphorical bone...a snippet of anecdote, or a nod of non committal acknowledgement.

Then we reach the real chicken bones, and everything changes.

Down goes the cutlery.

We did it without thinking, the first time. Having finished the breast, I reached for a leg from the central platter.

The thing was already in my hand. It was pure instinct to lift it to my lips and tear off a chunk of rich brown meat with my teeth. My mouth flooded with saliva as I tasted the bird's tender flesh, and I licked my fingertips for the salty fat from the skin.

It penetrated my mind that I had somewhat abandoned the social niceties of the formal dinner table.

I looked up and saw Joan with chicken juice dribbling down her chin and her fingers around the bird's other leg.

Our eyes met, locked.

Dignity was cast to the winds. There was a scramble for the wings and then the scraps left on the carcass, which we rather tore to pieces.

Afterwards we lay back on the couch, licking our fingers, replete.

No word was spoken. I watched the ceiling for a long time and Joan measured strands of her silky black hair.

That was the first time. These days Joan makes a show of getting out the knives and forks, and I make a show of using them, but we both know the truth.

A mark of a true breakdown of pointless social barriers within a household is when you can lick each other's fingers clean without embrassment or hesitation.

It is getting towards evening now. The oven is on. My tongue is tingling, and Joan is roasting a chicken tonight.

...

Xxxx

...

Author's note: This started out meaning to be funny, and came out rather laden, even riddled, with innuendo. So I just went for it. It's a bit silly but I like it. Sorry.


	5. Sherlock on football

Joan is watching TV. She has it on Mute and the screen is beyond my view round the corner of the living room arch, but I can see her and I know from her stance and the use of the Mute button, that she is watching sport.

Her stance: sitting on a dining chair,alert and poised as always, but now with added tension, a slight lean forward, eyes fixed forward, hands clenched.

She does not watch a great deal of TV, preferring to expend her time on fitness, familial duties and solving cases. I do not believe she would be this gripped by the latest talent show or cooking contest. Her surgeon's mind is too fine for that.

No, it is sport, probably American football, or football as they prefer to call it here. Completely different sport, nothing recognisable as football except the use of a large stadium and a ball.

This football is closer to rugger, except that the men at which Joan is staring so intently wear padding, that is to say, armour: giant shoulder pads, shin pads, mouth guards, helmets. And very tight fitting trousers, although I must assume that this is for aesthetic reasons since I cannot imagine, and will not invest time to confirm, that a butt closely covered in stretchy fabric, highlighting and defining the cheeks of the wearer, has any sporting efficacy. (Does it increase, or at least pacify, sections of the audience, who may have little interest in the game itself but who can tolerate the repeated sight of men in tight trousers grappling with each other?)

In rugger there is no armour, no protection of any kind. They simply send you onto the pitch with thirty or so other boys, and hope (I assume) that in ninety minutes' time that they will not have to ring your parents to inform them of the probable loss of all motion and sensation below the waist, or, horrifyingly, the neck. Spinal injuries resulting from school rugby matches are an aspect of British life which has mysteriously avoided the embrace of the health and safety brigade. If I wish to lean on a shovel by the side of the road I must wear a high visibility jacket, but if I wish to send my fourteen year old son into battle with instructions to extract a ball from a huddle of wrestling, stamping, kicking giants, with no weapons and no defence except the ability to run quickly (and occasionally, simply to hide) then that is all fine, jolly good, carry on, we'll let you know if anybody pulps his spine during the game.

I did not excel at school sports. I was insufficiently motivated to put in the time to become good. Also, much of the time they couldn't find me.

Joan is transfixed by this game. Her eyes are slightly widened, drinking in the action. She straddles a dining chair set in front of the screen, hands atop its back, lips just parted. It must be a very exciting game indeed, or perhaps proof of my tight trouser theory.

I am working, of course, which is why she has the TV muted, and yet the football remains an irritating distraction.

She never looks at me like that.


	6. Sherlock on late nights

Blue light from smartphones and computers disrupts sleep patterns. Many people stay up late with their device held like a talisman in front of their eyes , beaming chaos directly into their brains.

A book can be similarly hard to put down but has the benefit of not actually interrupting your circadian rhythms.

The phone is particularly insidious, promising as it does connection, comfort, entertainment, knowledge. (Porn.) At any moment, a whim from your deepest subconscious can be made real in the screen of your silky sleek handheld genie, with words, pictures and Dolby Digital sound...

I will just quickly look, some people think to themselves, while I have five minutes. I will just check my social media for updates or send some arbitrarily curtailed 140 character message to all the people who are desperate to hear that like them I am awake at the dead of night.

And while the statuses are loading or the news is refreshing I will just, very quickly, tap this other thing which has caught my eye while I am waiting. And perhaps a thing that intrigues me about something on that page too. just like lightning, it will only take one moment, and then I will be done.

And then you become aware that the clock no longer chimes ten or eleven, or even twelve, but has tailed off into the darkness and is chiming just one or two.

That's it, some people think then, better wrap this up before it gets really late.

It is bedtime, they remind themselves, and I can check all this again in another couple of hours, and why does my brain feel as if I have been pouring caffeine in through my eyeballs, why do I have retina burn when I close my tired, papery eyes?

Yes, these people reflect, it is definitely time to lay off the browsing and rest, time to just favourite any links I absolutely must return to in the morning, although it would be just as fast to read them now, to be honest, and as I am already on the page it would be inefficient, almost rude of me not to.

And that is generally when their housemate bursts into the bedroom and stands in the doorway, disconcertingly silhouetted in her underwear, shouting Give Me That Phone Or So Help Me, or something like that, probably.

And then some people think that maybe it is bedtime as she seems genuinely annoyed, although the underwear thing definitely creates an unhelpfully mixed message.

Luckily, for some of us the superior mind is able to control the use of technology and not the other way round.

(**Sent from my SmartPhone**)


	7. Sherlock on hemlines

A short skirt is, counterintuitively, the sign of economic prosperity.

Rather than full, long skirts indicating plenty - plenty of cloth, plenty of thread, plenty of time to imagine the legs it might reveal - it is the miniskirt which is an economic measure of the good times. Almost no fabric required, and no imagination either. The goods are on display. Perhaps this is it.

The shop is stocked and open for business.

A very high hemline displays a female's legs in an obvious sexual message of availability and readiness. This is well known, and strangely there is no clear male equivalent. A man in a miniskirt sends quite a different signal and he is apt to get beaten up on the subway, even if he is _undercover_ and has _very valid reasons _ for the outfit and make up.

Short skirts are like the flags used in marine navigation. The little ones that fly from the masts. They send a signal.

It is important to remember, however, that the signal is intended to be weak and generic, like a radio wave coming from the wrong side of the mountain: enough to inform you that you have found a jazz station rather than a hip-hop one, but no more. It is not a shortwave straight into your ear, not a direct invitation - so listen up, molesters, and learn the difference.

Joan frequently wears rather short skirts. An intelligent woman, she cleverly attempts to damp down the sexual availability signal by pairing this with opaque tights - not stockings, although this could form another intellectually intriguing line of enquiry - or sometimes, wearing a skirt over those excessively thin trousers which women refer to as leggings.

It is a good ploy, protecting her dignity as a person while maintaining the signal of feminine readiness. It prevents ogling by the kind of person who spends his time contemplating the female form in extreme detail...

Yes, a good ploy.

Joan's skirts vary in length, of course, principally governed by weather conditions presumably in combination with financial viability - micro not macro economics - but within a range of tolerance which I have not fully calculated. All of them, however, reveal an amount of thigh.

Joan has nearly perfect thighs. I have had the opportunity to study them from many (not all) angles and although I am not an expert in the aesthetics of female legs, merely an enthusiastic amateur, in my opinion there are no glaring flaws.

A short skirt and a smooth supple thigh and a cast iron dignity in the face of the frequent admiring glances attracted by the first two items, represents in my humble opinion, an ideal combination.

I must conclude however, from Joan's stony face as I sit typing this, that my congratulations on this achievement are not required.


	8. Sherlock on movies

Some people enjoy the deliberate suspension of disbelief involved in watching a film. Escapism, they call it

They have perhaps forgotten that if you need to escape, you need to run, flee, start now, go far away, even across an ocean, to be rid of your demons, and even then your pursuers may catch up with you. Sitting on the sofa, or in a cinema, watching fictional characters evading their enemies will not help you dodge your own.

Sometimes there is snuggling. Cuddling. More misdirected energy. If you wish to cuddle a person, be my guest. But you ought not to need the excuse of a film, a scary moment, a bump in the night, to reach out to the object of your affection. There is cowardice in that. And shame. Why hide from your desire for physical contact with another human? Perhaps you fear rejection and need to couch your desire in terms only of the movie, so that should a knock-back occur, there has been no breach of normal social propriety, because you were only watching a film.

Yes, this must be it. People cuddle in the audience, watching films, but it offers plausible deniability, so that as you stand once more in the foyer, blinking, wondering how it can still be light outside when you have just been to space and back, you can pretend that you never clutched at the other person, never gasped and put your hand on her arm, or her knee, yes, perhaps her knee, during a moment of dark suspense, never rested your cheek on her shoulder when some fictional characters expected your empathy, never pulled that other person close so that you can breathe into her hair as she sobs for an imaginary loss being suffered on screen by a person who is not even real.

There may be some merit in this theory.

For certain people.

I accept that this may be a useful strategy under certain specific circumstances, such as when you have made a perfectly sound deduction as to your companion's willingness to engage in physical activities including but hopefully not limited to hand holding and associated close proximity contact, but are uncertain how to broach the subject given her general forbidding air and liability to smack you in the face with a basketball when she feels you have stepped over the line.

Some people watch films for the purpose of seeing a particular story or a particular actor on screen. This is further evidence of the belief of the general populace that this passive engagement with fictional and/or unattainable beings somehow enhances real life. Does watching a story about a great detective increase your own chances of being a great detective? I think not. Although clearly many police officers have learned their interview technique from _Columbo_.

There is a film Joan made me watch recently. In summary, it concerns jump-suited men in space, weeping. Joan liked it a lot, especially the bony actor with the unnecessarily deep voice who contributed some of the crying. Joan believes him to be highly talented. She made this outrageous claim whilst looking at his legs, thus negating her assertion that he is skilled, since legs are a fact of nature and not something which, beyond certain basic maintenance and fitness, you can be skilled at. She greatly enjoyed his talent, that is, his legs, throughout the movie, causing me to have to nudge her repeatedly and remind her in a piercing whisper that the essence of a movie is its dialogue since without that there is nothing, and that a person's behind does not usually contribute materially to a conversation.

I still have a bruise where she elbowed me the last time.


	9. Sherlock on coffee

Joan brings me coffee in tall cups whenever there is a pause in the rhythm of our investigation. She usually assesses correctly my need for caffeine in its simplest beverage form, that is to say black coffee, strong. She says the three heaped spoons of sugar are my affair.

Sometimes, seduced perhaps by the manifold menu options of the kind of coffee place which has a Bean of the Week, she will place in front of me a drink which is topped with foam. I stare at her, attempting to save time and words by communicating my disapproval of pointless froth directly to her brain.

When this fails (and her brain is not inferior, she must be blocking me), I sip the drink and find it revolting, whether it is or not, and complain until she swaps me her drink. This is disgusting too, of course, but at least I have made my point.

When we drink from Styrofoam cups, it is through those little holes in the lids. A convenient device, assuming the lid itself is securely in place. But slurping hot coffee through a tiny opening is ironically an activity not suited to walking around in public. If you must, then all drawing up of froth from an oblate hole into your eager lips should take place in private, where you are free to lap the latte, teasing out the foam onto the willing curve of your tongue without subjecting innocent bystanders, or partners who are trying to concentrate, to this sultry spectacle.

Drinking from a china cup provides quite a different experience for drinker and observer.

Joan drinks slyly. She indicates perfectly her unconscious recognition of this sensual act by the very way she attempts to disguise it. (At least, in my presence. I have no data on her approach to coffee consumption when in company with others, and Starbucks does not afford many opportunities for unseen observation.)

She takes a fast sip, and swallows it away with the cup still raised, hiding the sinuous motion of her throat as the creamy liquid slips down. Looks at me as she takes another teaspoon's worth of caffeine transport into her mouth.

I gulp my own drink, hot black jolt burning my throat. Half the wake-up call I get from coffee is the scalding temperature at which I prefer to enjoy it. Why wait for caffeine to enter the bloodstream when light pain will also kickstart the deductive process? Joan says I will give myself hiccups. I say nothing, just look at her over the rim of my cup as if discovering serious flaws in her hair or make up. "Stop that," she says, and has another sip.

There is a tiny dot of foam on her lip - top left. As she speaks, it moves with her mouth, drawing the eye.

"What," she says. "You're staring."

Common practice is to say , _You have a little something_ - and point. Rather a bland approach. Alternatively you might reach across the table and tenderly wipe away the foam, brushing her top lip with the side of your thumb, which maybe catches a bit of that plump flesh, a caress of your calloused knuckle against her soft mouth until she leaps back saying, "What are you doing, do I have something on me," and scrubbing with a tissue, removing any trace of foam, or you.

Best not to, then. Best simply to sit and watch the foam until she goes to the bathroom and notices it. Or until some other unknown, more likely person does the thumb thing, it's fine, it's all fine, it's only a drop of coffee.

I may have an errant coffee droplet of my own, upper lip, just right of centre. She is frowning. Her gaze is on my mouth now. She shifts a bit and drinks more coffee behind her mug. I feign interest in the scene outside the window whilst maintaining her in peripheral vision.

I know she has seen it.

She leans forward. I remain perfectly still.

"Sherlock," she says, looking into my cup. "Your coffee's gone cold."

So it has.


	10. Sherlock on hot weather

If a meteorological event takes place within the bounds of a defined season, it must therefore be seasonable. And if I hear another weatherman describe the heat, or the cold, or the rain, as _unseasonable_ I am going to emigrate to an equatorial latitude so that I never experience weather again.

Joan thinks I should calm down and eat some ice cream. She says it's the heat.

It is not the heat. It is the punishing inaccuracy of televisual speech patterns. I can feel my mind crumbling against the tide of lazy qualifications and meaningless platitudes. And the weatherpeople are the worst offenders.

In Italy the army does the weather. You can be lounging in your Roman hotel room, wondering if today it will be the Colosseo or the Pantheon, allowing the musical tones of their endless brightly-lit talk shows to wash over you, when suddenly there is a change in timbre and you look up and there is a moustachioed man in full military regalia, scowling.

You sit up and wonder of your guidebook covers what to do in the event of a coup.

He begins shouting at the screen, furious, and a map appears and your holiday dissipates before your eyes and instead you think about borders (Italy has several but not with countries who will necessarily welcome refugees) and whether, if it came to it, you would have the guts to aid the Resistance.

Your companion emerges from her shower and stands calmly as the general's medals rattle with the force of his invective. Nothing fazes her. You will now be trapped in Rome at war, as supplies dwindle and Europe collapses around the Eternal City, and eventually, if the apocalypse lessens, you will be obliged to have children and found a new colony. And in a thousand years it will be known simply as Holme...

Or Watsonia, she says. Didn't you know the military run the weather office here?

It is a very effective way to get the information across. There are no niceties, as a battle-hardened soldier smacks cardboard sunbursts onto a map of the peninsula. It will be _hot_, dammit! Buckle up, civilians, there will be _weather_ and you'd better not come whining to me about it or you'll wish you'd never been _born_. And now the news.

In other countries they allow people who would like to be celebrities to present the weather as if it is a thrilling movie. Elements of plot and jeopardy are introduced. In America they favour probabilities, as if you might judge that a sixty percent chance of rain will allow you to continue your day, whereas a seventy percent chance will bring your plans crashing to a halt. In Britain there is enforced cheer at all times, and a focus on any areas with a slim chance of a break in the clouds. And the detail! In a country less than eight hundred miles long they spend five minutes earnestly analysing the possible weather within a twenty-five mile radius. As well as the national weather, farming weather, shipping weather and of course the vital week-ahead (subject to total change and therefore completely meaningless) forecast. In Germany they are a little more pragmatic. A map the size of the presenter's head appears in a corner of the screen, representing all of Germany, and then a single symbol – say, a sun – materialises. That's it. Local variations – sort yourselves out.

Joan says that ice cream really does help because it lowers your core body temperature. She adds, with what she imagines is her best threatening glare, that heat stroke is not a joke.

No indeed. Heat stroke is news, more news, news to fill the endless need for news which is the result of our twenty four seven media culture... and all the news needs words, and there are not enough original words to go round and anyway who can be bothered so they trot out the same old claptrap day after day -

Joan says that a wall of TVs generates even more heat and that she has plain vanilla ice cream and a spoon right here, right now.

More glaring. I quite like the glaring, it is reassuring.

We eat ice cream, draped on the couch, and then just as I think it might actually be cooling my brain, she spoils it all by commenting that boy, is it hot.


	11. Sherlock on scent

Everybody smells. This is a fact. Yet for the most part, people are passive recipients, rather than embracing the experience, becoming active smellers.

This, I believe, is a critical mistake. By ignoring smell we ignore some of life's richest bounties. By selectively praising and damning certain scents, (flowers, excrement), by judging them, we condemn the rest to obscurity.

Our brains are not so bigoted. The brain registers scent along with sound, sight and emotion, keying these to memory, enabling instant recall should one or all of the keys be triggered. We expect to be reminded of our holiday in France when a picture of the Eiffel Tower appears on the television: we are surprised when the scent of summer rain on a pavement takes us back to a moment giggling and breathless beside the Paris Greenmarket as the flower sellers hosed down their topiary and sprayed us into the bargain.

Scent is invaluable in my work. I encourage Joan to pay the same attention to olfactory clues that I do. She is fairly receptive, but balks at putting her nose to the ground any more than figuratively. Inviting her blindfold into the living room to discover what murder weapons could be identified by their scent alone, proved a disappointment. She detected the smell of a recently fired weapon quite successfully, and realised that foxgloves contain a lethal toxin, and I was initially hopeful that she possessed a sensitivity which would make her a real asset in our partnership. But she failed to identify freshly-stropped steel, even when I held it literally right under her nose. Her sudden gesture of defeat led to the axe falling, and only my fast reflexes saved her bare toes from making the discovery her nose could not.

She got the household gas straight away but tore off the blindfold before she could really learn from the experience, yelling something about basic safety and lack of imagination on my part - hardly fair as I am highly attuned to the parts per million of gas in air and was ready at all moments to step in and switch off the stove.

Modern society demonises human scent. Hundreds of products line our supermarket shelves, promising to eradicate our natural smell with chemically produced artificial ones. Admittedly the subway in summer is a fragrance smorgasbord too rich even for me. I encourage the regular use of soap in all individuals, and particularly those who enjoy sleeveless T shirts and hanging from the straps on the subway. But once one has become accustomed to detecting the odour of a human, it is possible to distinguish it from that of an animal or background scents.

I long for the nasal sensitivity of a canine. To be able to pick out and catalogue scents at that level would be a giant benefit in my work. Of course it would have its downsides.

"If I were a dog, that would knock me out."

"_That_ is Chanel No. Five."

"I know. And you have applied it to earlobes, wrists, inside of elbows, and backs of knees. Textbook, Watson - applying a fragrance lower on the body allows scent to rise up on the currents of body heat, pleasuring the nostrils of you and your companions. Bravo."

"Right. I'll see you later."

"Wait - the waft I received then was not from your knees at all. Where else have you spritzed? I can assure you that the pulse points, generating warmth, are the most efficacious."

"Sherlock. Where I put perfume is my business."

"Yet it sends signals, Watson, and you would do well to be aware of them so as not to be blindsided by - Oh."

"Do you _mind_?"

"Oh. Date tonight, then?"

"That's not your concern. Please don't try to deduce my social life. My _private_ life."

"Pulse points are best."

"Bye now. Don't wait up."

Door slam.

Door wrench open (scent of ancient oil and newly polished brass). "Cleavage is not a pulse point!"

Receding footsteps. "See you later, Sherlock."


End file.
